Microsoft presented the results for its second quarter of the 2010 fiscal year yesterday, which ended on December 29 2009. As it turns out, thanks to sales of Windows 7, Microsoft experienced a record quarter, which is especially welcome after the previous two lacklustre ones. It sold 60 million Windows 7 licenses during this record quarter.

"Lacking in coherence you say? Canonical are using the new KDE notification spec, both desktops use dbus and use various freedesktop specs. Qt provides native GTK theming which unifies the desktops' look.

Cool, they are now using a notification system that is utter crap compared to what is available on Windows and OS X (Growl). "

That's debatable. Having used KDE4, Windows XP, and Windows 7, I find it hard to believe that Windows notification bubbles are better than KDE4s simple notification applet. Don't know anything about Growl.

The biggest issue with Windows is that there isn't a centralised notification system. Every app uses it's own, and every systray applet uses it's own, and you can get bubbles hidden behind popups hidden behind slide-outs hidden behind modal dialogs.

At least with KDE, it's one tray icon, with a simple list that slides out.

DBus is a joke, really, compared to COM+, for example. Wake me up when I can easily invoke services from pretty much any app in a sane fashion. DBus integration for many apps is lacking or weak.

DBus, as with most GNOME technologies, isn't all that's it's cracked up to be. DCOP was much nicer, and easier to use to control KDE applications. It was also much more prevalent (was there a KDE app that didn't use/expose it?). Unfortunately, it seems the KDE people are much more willing to bend over backwards to help GNOME even if it means switching to inferior technologies (DCOP vs DBus, GTK+ support in QT, GStreamer support in Solid/Phonon).

I should be able to run a desktop operating system with 2d graphics that don't make me feel like I'm running Windows 3.1. I guess that's a bit much to ask.

What weirdo hardware are you using? If I can run KDE4 with desktop effects enabled on an eeePC 701, you should be able to run a 2D desktop on any video card. My home desktop even uses onboard Intel graphics with 8 MB of video RAM without tearing, artifacts, slowdowns.

Not all Linux distros are ready for the non-business-oriented desktop. However, a lot of Linux distros are most definitely ready for the business-oriented desktop. And some Linux distros are ready for the hobbyist consumer desktop.